


In Your Silences

by LucyLovecraft



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Development, Confessions, Developing Relationship, Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, Jurko Bohun vs. Emotions, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Power Imbalance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 07:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13922172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyLovecraft/pseuds/LucyLovecraft
Summary: It was Jan Skrzetuski's fate to love two very different men. One he had trusted with every atom of his being. The other he hardly knew how to trust at all.





	In Your Silences

**Author's Note:**

  * For [am_fae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/am_fae/gifts).



> I finally wrote a piece that has something resembling character development in it! Fair warning: the beginning of this is kinda dark, but I promise it's tagged "hurt/comfort" for a reason.
> 
> Originally for angst/fluff prompt from am_fae, "You're more than that", but it very quickly spiralled out from fill to full-length feels saga. Love and thanks to both am_fae and Tumblr user witchindeed, who are amazing.

“You are immaculate, my knight,” Jeremi said softly.  
  
Jan stiffened as Jeremi leant in close, holding his breath without knowing he did so. The prince ran a hand over the red wool of the uniform. Every detail was faultless, every tassel hanging straight, every button shining. Yet Jan Skrzetuski was no toy soldier: his gear was well-used, the hilt of his sabre worn, and the riding boots supple with long use. These things only made the picture more perfect.  
  
“Thank you, your highness,” Jan said, deeply moved by his prince’s praise. He was glad no more was required of him in this moment; he could hardly have spoken more, even had it been his place to do so.  
  
Jeremi touched his cheek, and Jan shut his eyes. Though he stood at attention, the young man’s whole being seemed to lean into the contact.  
  
“I have it in mind to reward you,” Prince Jeremi said.  
  
Jan’s eyes opened again, wide and bright. He was too well-disciplined to smile, but the hope that filled him shone through like light.  
  
Jeremi patted his shoulder indulgently.  
  
“Disrobe, Jan.”  
  
His smile did flicker through then, a boyish flash of white teeth and a flush of pleasure. The lieutenant stripped with military efficiency, conscious all the while of his prince’s eyes upon him. When he was done, Jeremi stepped nearer offering Jan his hand. Jan knelt, kissing it, then stood again as the prince raised him up.  
  
“I will require that you should be silent for this.”  
  
There it was: the challenge. Jeremi did not always ask such things of him, but Jan revelled in these chances to prove himself. Jeremi was his prince, and Jan his knight, and it seemed to Jan that all the heroic tales fell short of the simple purity of such devotion. Jan accepted each challenge with reverence and gratitude, loving Jeremi with his whole heart and loving him all the more for giving Jan the means to show his love.  
  
“Then I will be, my prince.”  
  
Prince Jeremi smiled at him, the dark eyes warm. “I have no doubt of it.”

 

  
And Jan was silent.  
  
Time had become meaningless, his body a prison, but he was silent.  
  
He kept his silence, holding it beyond anything he’d imagined he could endure and beyond even that, even when he felt he must cry out, that Jeremi _could not know_ how much Jan needed release. Jan was clutching at the sheets, shaking with the effort of control and the unbearable rapture of his torment.  
  
“You are doing so well, Jan.”  
  
Jan let the words wash over him, relief that his devotion had been seen sweeter than even the end he sought. And now, _surely_ , Jeremi would let him—

But it did not stop, and it did not end.  
  
Jan wanted to weep, he wanted to beg. There was nothing left of him but the pleasure and the pain: Jeremi, and the obedience the prince asked of him.  
  
Jan did not break the prince’s command. He could not break it, not when it was all he had left to cling to. His own breaths sounded loud and agonised in his own ears. He said nothing, but he mouthed, _“please”_ , over and over again until even the shape of the word had lost its meaning.  
  
“ _Please._ ” Though he begged, it did not stop.

“ _Please._ ” Unspoken, his plea resounded inside him.

 _“Please!”_ The word was voiceless on his lips even as he screamed it.  
  
When at last the prince released him the silence swallowed him whole.

Some part of Jan’s mind tore loose. He felt himself plummeting in sickening freefall, down and down, until he was sure he would fall forever, alone in the blackness. At the last minute Jeremi caught him and Jan clung to him, weeping with relief and for the overwhelming love in his heart.

 

  
  
As evening fell they lay together in the great bed, Jan still shuddering with the aftershocks of his pleasure and strain. Prince Jeremi was smiling softly, his arm warm around him.  
  
“I value you above all others, as you surely know,” said Jeremi, kissing his bare shoulder. “You are a knight without blemish, _Panie Janie_.”  
  
“It is easy to be so, when I serve such a prince,” Jan said.  
  
And it was. To serve Prince Jeremi was more than an honour. He had not merely given Jan’s life purpose, Jeremi had given him his destiny. All Jeremi asked for in return for this pearl beyond price was Jan’s fealty.  
  
In truth, Jan knew that his proffered service was simply another part of the gift Jeremi had given him. Who else could Jan have found to serve with such joy, and who but Jeremi would have been worthy of such service? Jan Skrzetuski was a nobleman and a soldier, but to be _Jeremi’s_ soldier, to wear his colours, made Jan more than what he had been. Even Jan’s own sworn word meant more when others knew that he was Jeremi’s beloved lieutenant. Jan represented Jeremi’s peerless honour and so it became Jan’s own, reflected and refracted through his every act of loving duty and devotion.  
  
Jan lay with his arm across Jeremi’s chest, almost protectively, and he imagined himself standing between Jeremi and harm. That he could obey an order to protect was a common thing: any soldier could obey. But Jan knew he would gladly use his own life as a shield with which to shelter his prince, and that knowledge seemed to him a gift as incalculable as God’s grace.  
  
Some part of him wished to tell the prince these thoughts, but Prince Jeremi was a man who preferred action to words. Jan admired that, and strove to show in his every deed what it meant to him that all the world knew he was Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki’s sworn knight.  
  
These, and other words he wished to say welled up inside him, filling his chest, but Jan held them back. That, too, was an act of love: Jeremi had been indulgent of his lieutenant’s effusions in the early days, but Jan had quickly seen that the prince needed no such words from him, and needed to speak them himself even less. Even that freedom from words had been a gift and a lesson. They could lie in each other’s arms as they did now, and let trust lie in silence between them.  
  
Jan shut his eyes, feeling a gratitude so poignant and profound that he ached. He needed no words, not with his prince. The silence was holy, sanctified by the beat of Jeremi’s pulse, the sound of his breath, and the passion of Jan Skrzetuski’s heart.

 

* * *

  
  
Bohun swore, still restless, and turned over again so they could lie face-to-face. After all their time together sleeping on the ground or sheltering in squalid hamlets, the softness of Jan’s own bed at home was apparently the most difficult for the Cossack to lie easy in.

It had been nearly a month since they’d arrived, and nearly five months since this inexplicable attraction had thrown them together. There was much that was rough and raw-edged between them; sometimes this restive dissatisfaction of Bohun’s hurt Jan, but not now. For now, Jan was satiated and exhausted in his own bed, happy with Bohun beside him.  
  
Still restless, Bohun began to kiss him again.  
  
“Be still,” Jan protested drowsily, not meaning it. He was content to lie in this soft, blurring half-dream beneath the sheets, smelling of sex and clean sweat. Every inch of him glowed. Jan thought he might like to sleep, but if Bohun desired to kiss him, Jan had no objections.  
  
Bohun did kiss him; he seemed unable to stop himself. He kissed Jan’s brow, his lips, his cheek, his neck, his shoulders. His hands wandered Jan’s body, warm and directionless, touching for the sake of touching, for the wonder of having him there to touch at all.  
  
Each kiss punctuated murmured words of Ruthenian that Jan heard more as a soft background hum than actual speech. Soon the declarations, half-formed lyrics, and terms of endearment began to take on a kind of rhythm, almost a chant. Jan shut his eyes, lulled by the sound of Bohun’s voice.  
  
Jan was aware of drifting in and out of consciousness, smiling each time he awoke to see Bohun there, still touching, still kissing. Sleepily, Jan would kiss him back and slip back into soft slumber.  
  
He started suddenly out of his warm dreaming as Bohun kissed him hard with lips that tasted of wine.  
  
The Cossack gave him a triumphant smile and leant back. Some part of that smile did not seem quite right, and Jan made himself focus on the other man’s face. Bohun was smiling, but the smile did not reach his glittering eyes.   
  
“What was that for?” Jan said, half sitting up.  
  
“I wanted you to kiss me, but you were asleep.”  
  
“That is… You are drunk, and very fortunate that I am fond of you.”  
  
“Should I beg your pardon for wanting to kiss you?” Bohun turned, reaching for the goblet of wine that stood by their bedside. “Should I ask your permission, Pan Jan?” He took a long draught, then handed it to Jan.  
  
Jan eyed the goblet, then the bottle by the bedside.  
  
“You have drunk nearly the entire bottle. Where’s the other one?”  
  
“That _is_ the other bottle,” Bohun answered.  
  
Jan sighed.  
  
“If I must live as a kept Cossack,” Bohun said, “I can at least drown my heartache in your fine, nobleman’s wines.”  
  
“What heartache? You have drunk all my wine and are therefore heartless.”  
  
“You do not deny that I am kept here?”  
  
That made Jan sit up straight. Bohun was indeed drunk, but this appeared more than one of his mercurial passions. There were strange currents here, and Bohun was already a perilous river.  
  
“I do not hold you here, you know that,” Jan said carefully, now fully awake and wary.  
  
“Yes, you do,” Bohun retorted.  
  
Jan hardly knew what to say to that. At last, heart in his throat, he asked the question he had long feared to ask: “Do you feel that you are trapped here?”

“I don’t know anymore. At first, yes, but now I...” The Cossack’s hand sought Jan’s almost without thinking.

Jan took it, and they stared together at their entwined fingers.

Bohun made as if to reach for the wine, then stopped himself. He stiffened, holding his head high as though going to the gallows.  
  
Jan waited, braced for what might come next.  
  
“I love you,” Bohun said wretchedly, then continued in a rush: “I love you, and I feel that I would burn the world for you, if you wished it. I would bring you any treasure, would take any oath. I would drown myself in a river, if you asked. I have been here with you almost a month, and I know you want me to stay. Yet you do not even ask that I stay, because you know—because you know me too well, and know that, if you asked me to stay, I would surely go.”  
  
His poise crumbled and Bohun clutched at his hair, looking wild: “And I would have to go, if you asked me to stay! How _can_ I stay? How?”  
  
“I wish you to be happy,” Jan told him, grieving, though he meant every word. “If you want to go—”  
  
“But I don’t know what I want. And the longer this continues, the more I feel I don’t even care what I want!”

He seized Jan’s hands then, expression desperate, searching the other man’s face.

“What do you want? Let me do that!” Bohun cried, despairing. “For you, I could offer up my Cossack glory to God and live as your stablehand, as your servant, if only...”  
  
“Do you ask me what I would want?” Jan felt himself on the edge of a precipice.  
  
“I demand it,” Bohun said, as though his soul hung in the balance. “Please.”  
  
Jan knew too well what he wanted. He wanted Bohun here with him, or for the Cossack to let Jan follow wherever caprice carried him. He wanted to wake each morning beside him, and for them to sleep each night in each other’s arms. He knew he wanted all these things, and knew with equal surety that he could not have them, not with a man like Bohun. But his lover had asked Jan what he wanted, and no man had yet been able to reproach Jan Skrzetuski with cowardice.  
  
“Stay with me,” Jan said, light-headed with dread, but resolute. “Stay.”  
  
Bohun moaned.

“Then I stay. I will stay! I am your fool, a serf in truth—your tame Cossack!” He buried his face in Jan’s hands. “How do you _do_ this to me, that I would serve you as if you were a prince?”  
  
Jan could say nothing. Instead of joy, he felt only a chill about his heart. At last he managed to say, “I am no prince.”  
  
“No,” Bohun said miserably. “You’re more than that. All your princes are thieves of men’s lives and liberties. You have stolen more.”  
  
“I am no prince,” Jan said again.

“Of course I know that!” Bohun protested. Then he sat up and looked at Jan more carefully, disliking some quality in his lover’s stillness. “What? What have I said?”  
  
“No, it is nothing.”  
  
“You are lying to me,” the Cossack said, stricken. “I have told you all my truths so you may use them against me! Can you not then tell me when I have done wrong?”  
  
“Do I cause you pain?” Jan asked, unable to help himself. “Do you feel I ask you to be something other than what you are, for me?”  
  
“No,” Bohun’s reply was almost scornful. “I sometimes feel I do not know myself anymore, but there is no constraint, as I’d thought there must be. It feels”—he touched his chest—“too vast, too open.”  
  
“But you sounded as if I’d stolen your very freedom from you! You did not even wish me to ask you to stay.”  
  
“I know!” Bohun cried, “I don’t understand it!” He looked at Jan then, racked by his own incomprehension: “But I know I was glad when you asked me to stay.”  
  
“Then stay,” Jan said.  
  
Bohun trembled, his knuckles white as he gripped Jan’s hands. “First, tell me what I did wrong. Tell me what made you look at me like that.”  
  
Jan felt his mind shy away from the answer he must give. It was as Bohun had said: the Cossack had bared his soul, inasmuch as the passions that ruled him allowed Bohun to know that strange  _anima_. Jan owed him as much in return.

In all the months they’d spent together, Jan had never asked him for pledges or promises. Words of love such as all lovers use had passed between them, but Jan had not imagined deeper declarations formed any part of Bohun’s feelings for him.

Yet now Bohun had given Jan this unlooked-for revelation. Impossible as it seemed, and beyond all hope, Jan now knew that he was not alone in this strange, helpless love.  
  
He knew also that Bohun had faced some inner torment in order to bring Jan the truth of his heart, confronting some great darkness within himself in order to win it and lay it at Jan’s feet.  
  
Bohun could not know that he had now asked the same of Jan. Yet Jan could do no less than Bohun himself had done.  
  
“When I was in the prince’s service—” he began, then stopped as he saw the look on Bohun’s face. “You will not wish to hear this.”  
  
Bohun’s voice was almost a croak as he answered, “Let me hear it, whatever it may be.”  
  
The words were strangely comforting. Holding tight to his resolve before it failed him, Jan continued, “In the prince’s service, he and I grew very… close.”  
  
A quick catch of breath, then a hiss as Bohun let it out again.

“What did he do,” the Cossack asked, “that this pains you so?” He was still, but even his stillnesses were violent.  
  
“Nothing!” Jan exclaimed. “Nothing like—like what you may think. He’s not the monster you people paint him as.”  
  
“Is he not?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Then why—no, don’t turn away from me, Jan!”  
  
“Then do not look at me like that!”  
  
“Like what?” Bohun cried, “Like I wish to kill him?” He started up from the bed, snatching the wine bottle from the table. He began to pace, taking long pulls from the bottle as he did so.  
  
“Yes!” Jan said. “It is unjust! He did not know that it hurt me.”  
  
Bohun froze mid-stride, his expression terrible. Hellfire burned in his eyes as he whispered, “Did not know that _what_ hurt you?”  
  
“He was a demanding commander. He wanted me to be a better soldier, a better knight. And I—the things he asked of me were not intended to hurt me. But he was too far removed from the selfish needs of small, common men. He did not intend to be cruel, but I loved him so desperately that I—”  
  
The wine bottle shattered against the wall, red wine staining the wood and a sparkling burst of glass shards skittering across the floor.  
  
Bohun lashed out, kicking over a table, the whites of his eyes showing in the dim room. Then, finding no better object, the demon of fury that possessed him seemed to spiral in on itself. He crouched on his heels, hands in his hair, face dark and twisted with rage.

Jan knew _he_ was safe, but Bohun looked as though his furies might tear down the very foundations of his soul. Half-formed threats hissed from spit-flecked lips, and whatever humanity he possessed was drowned in a demoniac seizure.  
  
Staring at the apparition crouching there in Bohun’s form, Jan felt doubts clawing up inside him. He could barely endure the sight of what he saw looking out through Bohun’s eyes. How could he entrust his heart to a man like this? That Bohun wished no harm to him he knew, but sorrow and destruction followed in the man’s wake. Jan even knew that Bohun meant well, or at least that he meant well in those moments when his deeds had an intent and meaning behind them other than blind instinct. Yet most often, the man was ruled only by his own sudden and violent passions, and therein lay his madness.  
  
A cool, familiar voice spoke in Jan’s head: _He is not safe, you young fool. Even for a Cossack, he is more animal than man._  
  
Memories came back, the words no longer an imagined reproach, but conversations from long ago:  
  
_“Like all his savage people, he is too selfish to see the harm he does, let alone comprehend it,” the prince said, speaking of Khmelnytsky, though the words now seemed to refer to another. “They covet the prerogatives of noble birth and privilege, but have not even the wits to understand the responsibilities those must entail.”_  
  
_Of Bohun, he had even said: “I once considered trying to bring him into my service. He has a certain reputation that could prove useful. If I could bring him to heel, I might then be able to keep him on a chain to let slip when necessary. But now I know that such a mad dog would break its teeth trying to gnaw free of any chain that held it.”_  
  
_“We must put duty foremost,” the prince had said. “And not think of our own happiness alone.”_  
  
_“Fools follow blind sentiments,” Jeremi had said._  
  
_“I have asked you not to importune me with these questions, Jan. I am disappointed.”_  
  
_“These displays are unseemly in a soldier.”_  
  
_“It is because I value you that I ask this of you, my knight.”_  
  
So much that Jeremi had said. So much which had once been all the truth Jan asked from the world, all his certainty, all his hopes, and all his love.  
  
_“Self-sacrifice sanctifies.”_  
  
_“I love you.”_  
  
_“A higher good.”_  
  
_“More than any other.”_  
  
_“A perfect knight.”_  
  
_“My Jan.”_  
  
_“Mine.”_  
  
Jeremi had said once that—had said…  
  
He started from reverie to see Bohun was on his knees by the bedside, staring up at him.  
  
“I’m sorry,” the Cossack rasped, dark face gone pale, “you told me I would not like it—and I see now that you did not wish to tell me—but Jan, forgive me, I—I can hardly think for the desire of death that howls in me.”  
  
“You could not have known,” Jan told him, putting a hand on Bohun’s shoulder. With an effort of will that nearly destroyed him, he struggled for one perilous moment to quiet the turmoil within. He looked into Bohun’s eyes and, seeing the distress there, conquered—but barely. Jan wished to smile, but managed only a slight shrug. “Let us speak of something else.”  
  
_“No.”_ The word made Jan’s hair stand on end. Bohun was staring at Jan as though he _hated_ him.  
  
Bohun snatched Jan’s hand from his shoulder, seizing it in a grip that made bone and tendon ache.  
  
“Come back!” Bohun cried.  
  
“What?” Jan said, trying to pull his hand back. This madness was beyond any extreme he could have imagined. A moment ago he had been sure Bohun would never hurt him, but now he did not know: he had never seen such an expression on the other man’s face before. “Be reasonable! I have gone nowhere. Perhaps you should—”  
  
“You asked me to stay with you, but where am I then to go when you leave like that?”  
  
“What are you talking about?” Jan could hardly believe that a human being could look as Bohun did now. Was the man possessed, in truth?  
  
“Yes, you have! I was angry over what you said, and then you stopped speaking and you _left_ me. One moment I was talking to you, and the next there was this mask of—I don’t know—but it was not you!”  
  
Jan stopped trying to pull his hand away.  
  
“Perhaps I was wrong to press you,” Bohun raved on, dreadful to behold, “but I cannot watch you make a cage of yourself like that. I won’t! Why do you do that? _What did he do?_ ”  
  
Bohun’s rage became clear to Jan then. The unknown became known: impossible as it seemed, Jan understood. The clamoring fears subsided into a ringing silence like the quiet after cannonfire.

The Cossack was breathing hard, still clutching Jan’s hand. Slowly, Jan took it in both his own.  
  
“He did to me what you have seen,” Jan said sadly, simply. “He took me, and he would not let me go. I was unhappy, but I did not wish to go.” Strange, to sum up so much doubt and pain in so few words. “He was a great prince, and I merely his soldier, so what were my desires compared to his? How could I ask so much of him?”  
  
“Is this how it begins with you people? Every king and every prince telling their nobles to make themselves smaller, to accept what they’ve been given, and every noble tells the merchant, and so on down to the meanest serf? How could what you want be unimportant?”  
  
“How could it not be unimportant when weighed against the good of a great ruler, or of a country?”  
  
“Sacrifices must be made in war. But if he could not love you, he did not deserve to have you.”  
  
It was a shocking thing to hear Jurko Bohun say, but more than anything it shocked Jan how much it _hurt_. He let out a slightly hysterical laugh as he said, “Do you lecture me on tender love, Cossack?”  
  
Baffled hostility flickered across Bohun’s mobile face. Jan steeled himself for rage, almost hoping for it. But then it seemed to Jan that Bohun let the passion sweep through him, like a wave passing under the keel of a ship. Jan saw the effort with which Bohun clung to that calm but he was almost unable to believe his own eyes.  
  
“I may only be a Cossack,” Bohun said heavily, holding his gaze, “but a Cossack may have honour enough to admit he has been wrong, as other honest men do. I do not know how it is for you nobles. I have done wrong, and am not afraid to tell you so.”  
  
Jan squeezed his hand, contrite. “I am sorry, too; I did not mean what I said. You see that we nobles must admit our mistakes, too. And I have made so many mistakes that you would think I would find it easier to do.”  
  
Bohun said nothing, staring up at Jan, expectant and silent and _listening_ as though all his wild intensities had been focused to a single point.  
  
Jan found himself speaking the words almost without knowing it: “Loving Jeremi was one such mistake.”  
  
And, under the intense scrutiny of Bohun’s blue-green eyes, he did not feel he needed to either excuse Jeremi or to blame himself.  
  
Bohun had been on his knees by the bed but now he rose and perched on the side of it—an uncertain position, with his weight barely on the bed at all.  
  
How quickly this man’s moods changed, Jan thought: a moment before he had been a demon, and now he sat poised for flight.  
  
“Jan,” he said slowly, “I did not want you to ask me to stay. Yet I see now that I wanted to hear you ask it of me, more than anything. I had thought I wanted to go. Maybe I still do. I don’t know! But I told myself, ‘If he asks me to stay, I will go, because I will lose too much of myself if I stay’.”  
  
He looked at Jan, each word seeming to burn through him as he spoke: “But it may be that—that I wish to go because I fear that, if I stay as you ask, one day you will regret asking, and I will see it in your eyes. I will not stay to become your next mistake.”  
  
“Jurko,” Jan whispered, moved beyond any words but that one name. He pulled Bohun to him, and felt the Cossack lay his head on Jan’s shoulder, his eyelashes tickling against his skin. Jan had his eyes open but saw nothing, lost in a happiness of a kind so new and unfamiliar that at first he hardly recognised what it was he felt.  
  
“I love you,” Bohun told him, and Jan had never imagined that one man could sound so hopeless and so hopeful.  
  
“I love you, too.” He leant back, studying that dark, passionate face.  
  
“Ask me to stay,” the man said.  
  
“Why? Why do you need me to ask?” Jan regretted the question as soon as he’d asked it. _Foolish,_ a cold voice said.  
  
But if Bohun thought it strange or foolish, he showed no sign of it. Instead he was silent for a time, then said, “I want to stay because you wish it. And because I wish it. And because whatsoever you wish for, I seem to wish for as well.”  
  
The Cossack paused, apparently waiting to see if more of his own heart would be revealed to him. Yet, receiving no further answer, he shook his head: “I know no other way to say it. I seem to have many reasons, but I feel I understand only those three.”  
  
“Then stay,” Jan said, heart full.  
  
Bohun looked as though all the hopes and fears of his unquiet soul had come true in one shattering instant. It was terrible to see, but Jan reached out to him, and his touch stole the storm’s fury. With a sigh, Bohun let Jan pull him into a kiss full of gentle fire. Jan felt the other man’s body lean into his. Giving himself up to the sweetness of Bohun’s mouth, Jan put his arms around his lover’s waist and pulled him down onto the bed with him.  
  
When at last they had said all they wished to say with touch, Bohun looked at Jan, eyes flitting over each detail of his face.  
  
“What do you feel now?” the Cossack asked him.  
  
“Happiness,” Jan said with a sigh. “Pure and simple as God’s truth.”  
  
“But _how_ do you feel it? I still feel as though I could burn down the world for you, but…”  
  
Jan could not help laughing at that. “Could you not contemplate a less violent expression of love? A village, at least, rather than the whole world?”  
  
“Maybe.” Bohun said, fidgeting with his pillow. Then, satisfied at last, he lay his head down again. “But how do you feel it?”  
  
“Like trumpets in my heart, Jurko.” He grinned, gazing at his madman. “Loud trumpets, to be sure. And brazen.”  
  
“What else?”  
  
“Like wine,” Jan said, pulling him closer, kissing his brow, “and like music, and sunlight after rain.”  
  
“And?”

Laughing, Jan went on: “Like a dream, perhaps: the kind you fear you will wake from, because you do not want it to end.”  
  
“I feel that, too.”  
  
“Was that the answer you were looking for, then?” Jan asked. “Or are you thinking of writing a song and have no words of your own left, and must purloin mine?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Bohun said. He had said those words many times that evening, but he sounded less troubled now by his own uncertainties. “I suppose I like to hear you tell me of it. But I don’t know.”  
  
Jan could find no other response but to kiss him again, caught up in this beautiful delirium. He felt all he had described and more, until the whole world became Bohun’s touch and the warm circle of their arms around each other, with all the stars and celestial spheres of God’s cosmos spinning round them.

 

  
Waking in the morning, Jan found himself still tangled in Bohun’s arms. The Cossack was half sprawled on top of him, his head on Jan’s chest. His weight had turned one of Jan’s legs to pins and needles, and Jan grunted with the effort of trying to move out from under him. Bohun’s encircling arm tightened its hold as he did so, a ludicrous scowl showing on his sleeping face. Jan began to shake with silent laughter at the sight, then continued to laugh from sheer lightness of heart. That this jounced Bohun’s head only made him laugh harder.  
  
The blue-green eyes opened, a steppe fighter's instincts bringing him fully awake in one moment. Seeing Jan’s smile, he answered it with one of his own.  
  
“What are you laughing at?”  
  
“You.”  
  
Bohun made as if to roll away, but Jan pulled him back.  
  
“For this, I am to stay?” Bohun said, turning his eyes to heaven. “To be mocked in my sleep? _Ay_ , and the Poles say we Cossacks are a cruel people.”  
  
“God will surely redeem your suffering.”  
  
“I would rather you remind me again why I stay,” Bohun said, kissing him.  
  
“Because I love you, madman though you are.”  
  
“Remind me,” Bohun smiled, half-joking, half-serious. “Tell me what you said last night. All those things you feel—tell me them again.”  
  
He did. Jan told Bohun he loved him in a thousand words, and a thousand more, all that long, lazy morning, and for long years thereafter.


End file.
